Son of Xuan Li, the adopted son of Grand Secretary Xuan Mo, and father of Xuanyu and Xuan Yu. He was born clever and eager to learn, with a memory that held everything it took in, and under his father’s influence he wanted nothing so much as to restore the Xuan family.
To that end Xuanji moved among every faction in the world, and working from the fragments of the Black Demon Wound he developed the Sha-Chi generation device — the root of everything that Transcension would later become.
In the thirteenth year of The Order, Xuanji died on Tianling Peak.
Xuanji held that “the strong match wits, the weak match force”, which is why neither his martial skill nor his ideas about martial arts ever stood out.
What he had instead was Xuan-family technology, with which he built two excellent aids, and with them his strength reached the first rank of the Wulin.
The first was his mechanism lens. Building on Xuan-family technology and his own ideas, Xuanji created this “monocle”; it can be woken with a very small amount of Sha-Chi, and then it swiftly analyses the flow of an opponent’s Sha-Chi and every one of his physical indicators, which amounts to a perfect prediction of the opponent’s next move. His son Xuanyu chose to have his eyes remade outright instead.
The second was his gloves. With Xuan-family technology Xuanji made a pair that stimulate the acupoints of the arms and sharply raise Sha-Chi for a short time; combined with the mechanism lens, they let him finish an opponent in a single burst. His son Xuanyu later inherited the gloves and rebuilt them into a weapon of his own — Oblivion.
And of course Xuanji kept one more card to play, for when it was needed. He developed an exceedingly ingenious concealed-weapon device and set it in his own mouth: once it was triggered, poisoned needles would fly out at once, catching an opponent completely off guard.
Early years
As the house of a Grand Secretary at court, the Xuan family had once been ordered to study the Heavenly Tome, and it held a great deal of secret technology nobody else knew of. Xuan Mo, head of the house at the time, took the Remnant Volume of the Heavenly Tome and fled the palace with it in secret; out in the desert he built an extraordinarily complex mechanism vault and hid the volumes he had carried off inside it, keeping only one in his hand.
That vault lay a hundred feet under the yellow sand, beyond any attempt to break it open by force. The key to it existed only in theory — it would take Sha-Chi far beyond anything the finest masters of the present Wulin could raise, poured in through a matching shape to wake the precision mechanisms inside, before the door would open.
Every generation of the Xuan family after that was raised on Xuan Mo’s bequest: study the one volume the ancestors left until it was mastered, and develop Sha-Chi generation fine enough to open the vault door, and so carry on the Xuan family’s great wish to build a new world.
By Xuanji’s generation he had grown up steeped in all of that family history and duty.
After his father Xuan Li died of his own ambition and plotting, Xuanji learned that the Black Demon Wound — the only “key” that could open the vault — had shattered, unable to bear the surging mass of Sha-Chi, and that the fragments could not be reforged for the time being.
So he could only lie low, and while he went on serving the reigning Bastion Lord Mo Tian, wait for a descendant of the House of Mó to appear who once again had the power to open the vault.
A different road
The waiting went on for ten years. In that time Mo Tian had a son, Mo Jian, and when the child was born Mo Tian took blood from the umbilical cord and tried it against the fragments, and still the Black Demon Wound could not be reforged.
Xuanji was no longer willing to wait. He gave up reforging the fragments and turned his eyes instead to a new way of using them that he had developed: an extraordinarily complex and precise mechanism that could draw out the Sha-Chi held inside the fragments and pour it into a human body, raising that person’s fighting strength — though the same person would lose control of his temper as the Sha-Chi overflowed.
This “Sha-Chi generation technology” could not open the vault door, but if he had the fragments and applied them to it, it would plainly be enough to overturn the whole Wulin, and even to rule the world. Xuanji reasoned that once he ruled the Wulin he would have the resources to recreate the key that opened the vault. That left only one problem — how to get the fragments out of Mo Tian’s hands.
So Xuanji set about looking for someone he could work with. Almost everyone who met him came away impressed by his mastery of mechanical arts and of the nature of all things, and by his imagination and inventiveness, which turned into a thousand shapes. Xuanji, by contrast, rarely met anyone he thought worth his time.
It was then that the newly founded The Order came into his view. After sounding it out from several sides, Xuanji at last had a long private talk with Mu Tianmiao, The Order’s leader. Xuanji said he could work from within and help Mu Tianmiao destroy the Bastion of Mó, and that all he wanted for himself was to take his family’s relic back.
Mu Tianmiao was not a man to believe Xuanji’s fine words so easily, but every question he pressed was turned aside with answers that were half true and half not.
In the end the two struck a bargain, the Bastion of Mó fell, and Xuanji took ten fragments. He knew perfectly well that Mu Tianmiao had taken one for himself, but he made no great fuss about it — ten fragments were already enough for his plan to control the Wulin through Transcension, and as for the last one, once he was strong enough he could take it back from The Order soon enough.
The Tianling Massacre
After that Xuanji found a natural ally in the Golden Swordsman, who also wanted to rule the Wulin, and together they laid a cruel plan: use the Sha-Chi generation device to drive the leading figures of the Wulin into killing one another in madness, then use Sha-Chi technology to remake those desperate to become strong into a great army.
By then both House Long and the House of Mó had fallen, and if their plan worked they would hold the whole Wulin in their hands.
The plan went into action. With the power of the fragments as its energy source, Xuanji built a terrible Sha-Chi infusion facility — a thing that could pour enormous amounts of Sha-Chi into a human body, clouding the mind and raising the urge to kill.
Word of the Heavenly Tome soon began to spread through the Wulin. In the end they issued hero invitations, calling the heroes of the world to Tianling Peak to look upon the Remnant Volume of the Heavenly Tome.
At last the heroes of the world gathered on Tianling Peak. Xuanji said farewell to his young son and his infant daughter, went out to the foot of Tianling Peak and met the Golden Swordsman there. Then Xuanji started the Sha-Chi infusion device, and soon the Wulin elders, under the influence of that overwhelming concentration of Sha-Chi, fell on one another, until the peak ran with blood.
Xuanji watched it all from a distance, and the deaths of those men did not trouble him — since ancient times, who ever rose to great things without walking up over piles of bones?
But the Golden Swordsman did not see it that way.
He had been prepared, and still the hell before his eyes appalled him — Xuanji’s mind was deep and impossible to read, and if he ever turned, the Golden Swordsman’s own end might be worse than these men’s.
So he acted at once, and ran Xuanji through with a single sword. Xuanji, to his surprise, counterattacked in a last-ditch effort: the poisoned needles long since hidden in his mouth blinded the Golden Swordsman in both eyes. But Xuanji went down in the end, and all his technology and all his research still passed into the other man’s hands.